Friday, 30 May 2014

Ok here is my idea for quickly generating large underground volumes extending through three dimensions.

Divide an a4 sheet into quadrants.

Quadrants are either top-down or vertical.

If vertical then top is always at the top. If horizontal then North is at the top, the other compass points arranged as usual.

If you want, one vertical compass can have Up, Dwn, North, South instead, but that is a bid to mind-bending and crazy for right now so we will leave it out.

You need about three passage-forming elements. We will start with the simplest, a river. In blue.

Remember in the vertical sections a river can only go down, never up. Now we will add a fault.

Now a mine in green.

There are four kinds of hex, depending on how many lines are in the hex.

No lines - the wilderness of stone. Hard travel, have to search, go cave-by-cave.
One - Transport possible along route. Semi-wilderness, encounters rare but nearly unavoidable when they do happen.
Two - More travelled. Tribes. Small outposts. More encounters, can be avoided.
Three - Likely encounters, organised polities, armies, population centres.

So, depending on what hex you are in you just describe what you see on the map.

"A river leads straight down, a fault leads down to the west and up east, a minework leads up and west."

You can still search to go anywhere but those are the main routes and should (eventually) take you somewhere.

Encounter density probably equivalent to desert. Routes will compress travellers but population much lower overall so should even out.

Sunday, 25 May 2014

Paolo has his own blog but he is one of those rare nerds who would rather communicate with another human being rather than just sit on his own writing. So here is a transcript of our G+ conversation with all the random stuff and missplings left in.

Patrick Stuart

How do you like to be interviewed?

Paolo Greco

Wait what?

Paolo Greco

It depends on what. If you want we can start in hangout and I can write you emails for difficult answers or these which need research?

Patrick Stuart

About italian RPG's. It would be a kind of public service thing for the nerdosphere.

Paolo Greco

I am only aware of stuff that happened in the eighties and nineties though, and the late nineties are a bit spotty.

Patrick Stuart

Hm

Paolo Greco

Mind you, I left in 2004.

Patrick Stuart

I could just ask you here if you don't mind

Paolo Greco

sure

Patrick Stuart

PAOLO GRECO, WHAT WAS THE FISRT RPG YOU PLAYED IN ITALY??????

Paolo Greco

I ran T&T in primary school. It was translated in the mid 80s. I learnt how to play T&T from gamebooks from the public library, and that's what I used to run the game. T&T is great. The adventure I ran was The Amulet of Salkti. It has a super-cool mini-saltbox in it. And it's a gamebook.

Twas really short lived. Then I ran some DSA (the first and second edition were translated mid-80s as well), which was more long-lived. There were some adventures for DSA in the library.

The first Italian rpg I played was Holmes & Co., which is an Arthur Conan Doyle-style game, which was run for me only by my buddy Andrea. I remember coming down with a bad fever playing it and misunderstanding more and more the more feverish I was getting. It was also the first time I played a tabletop RPG, and after that session I hid back behind the screen. And it took me four years before leaving it again.

Patrick Stuart

Is DSA the Dark Eye?

Paolo Greco

Years

Patrick Stuart

Holmes and co sounds interesting? What do you remember of it through the fever-haze?

Paolo Greco

It a as really light on mechanics. Like a game where players get to unfold a mystery. In a sense its an RPG because you have a demiurge customising the experience for you, but in another sense IIRC the focus was on gathering hints and solving the mystery. More like a puzzle game, or a murder party. I haven't seen the handbook in more than twenty years, mind you

Man this intervew format is great. You're asking me things I don't even remember knowing, if you know what I mean.

Patrick Stuart

Do you think the people who made holmes and co had read American/Anglo rpgs? Were they just inventing stuff on their own?

RPGs derived from party games sounds interesting.

Patrick Stuart

(p_-)

Paolo Greco

sorry, I missed the update. I have no idea but in retrospective I think they might had. Lotronto (one of the authors) seems to be active in the murder party scene. I'm contacting him via email.

I contacted Lotronto and he gave me an old interview. Turn out he read all the tules systems he could find back in the day, from D&D varieties to Traveller to T&T. And he came up with a veeery rulelight, no-action game: the game was to be only deductive in the style of non-action, Doylesque crime novels. Character sheets morphed into scripts and H&Co morphed into murder parties. He likes them much better.

Paolo Greco

it might be a bit before he answers. any other questions?

Patrick Stuart

What other Italian RPG's have you played or run?

Paolo Greco

I ran Kata Kumbas, which is awesome and weird, Cyb, which cyber-postapocalypse, Druid, which is Fantasy-Celtic, and played this weird sci-gonzo rpg where we were a cyber-band called "From Calabria with a Van", which is a pun on the Italian title of "Fist of Fury", and when I was 16 it was effing hilarious and the game was ace.

Patrick Stuart

If some ango/american OSR G+ nerd magically learnt to read italian and ran Kata Kumbas, what would they notice as being different from the games they knew?

Paolo Greco

First of all, the art. There's a bucket of d100 chargen tables that occupy a whole spread, with 100 illustrations and 100 inheritance items, saints and so on. A table per class, or so. More art for the shops: the "list" is in fact a serie of full-spread illos.

Paolo Greco

Second, they would not be getting the meaning of the setting, and the reason d'etre of the game. Laitia is the name of the country, and it's a rearranged and anagrammed Italy (Italia). The town names are anagrammed, and are sort of fantasy caricatures of the real places. Region names too, so the region Friuli Venezia Giulia becomes Landa delle Furenti Viole (Land of the Furious Violas), and Sardegna becomes Sgradena. All the book is full of references to past Italy (from pre-Roman to the Renaissance i'd say, but the setting is after-empire) which would be completely missed. The setting is also very interesting.

Paolo Greco

Is the game setting based on a country-wide inside joke? No, but it's hiding behind it

Patrick Stuart

Interesting. What about the mechanics?

Paolo Greco

KK mechanics are extremely lightweight. But almost every class has its own extra mechanic. And there are 12 classes. And if the character is from the Ancient People (Laitian autochtones, as opposed to Roma or Hyperboreans, the two other playable enthnic groups) they get weird powers if their star sign is right.

so the mage cast spells, the summoner summons light or dark spirits (partially at random), the alchemist does alchemy, and so on. Three of the 12 classes, only available for the Ancient People, are monks of the New Cult, a faux-christian religion that strangely manages to be interesting.

Patrick Stuart

What are the classes?

Playable ethnic groups but not playable races ie dwarfes, elves etc?

What makes the religion interesting?

Paolo Greco

and the game exploits a setting between paganism and faux-christianity in an intriguing way. for example the characters are asked to go and destroy this terrible apocalyptic book at one point, and they do it because well, the world might end otherwise and it doesn't matter what they believe, and it works if they spray holy water on it even if they are pagans, because the water has been sanctified by a monk with genuine faith.

Paolo Greco

do you have any other KK questions??

Patrick Stuart

Probably. But dont' worry about speed. take as much time as you like we can just pick it up whenever you are free

Paolo Greco

I'll have a phone conversation with one of the two Holmes & Co authors this weekend

Paolo Greco

The sci-gonzo game is "Röle". Our version is a reprint that sold for 2000 IT£ (70p) in the mid '90s. The serie was called "the Games of the 2000" because year 2000 and 2000 lire:

http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_giochi_del_2000

I have a few of them. Small but awesome.

Paolo Greco

more covers. The format is A6 IIRC:

http://rpggeek.com/image/573023/role/2012/03/1.jpg

http://maurolongo.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/1.jpg

Patrick Stuart

What happened when you ran KK??

Paolo Greco

can;t remeber much but the last time players didn't get it

Patrick Stuart

Did it go wrong?

Paolo Greco

unsympathetic group

Paolo Greco

also they were not much into playing an RPG that often feels like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L'armata_Brancaleone

Patrick Stuart

How about Cyb, what would an OSR person notice about that?

Paolo Greco

Cyb. You have stats and instead of a die you use a deck of cards and try to draw under your stat, and for difficult rolls you had to match a colour too. Cards because dice were scarce, while every house in Italy has some decks of cards. Like, three or four. And you wake up in a vault. And you're a cyborg. And go do post apocalyptic stuff. And instead of xps you get to draw a card. And that card is a subroutine you can use to program your cyborg body to do awesome stuff. There are quite a few programs in the book. This part was awesome. Never played it, sadly, but now I'd say it wounds traveler-like. But without a spaceship.

Patrick Stuart

It sounds amazing. I think the only one we haven't looked at is Druid. What was that like?

Paolo Greco

Druid... I haven't read or played it in twenty years. Published by Editrice Giochi, a big Boardgame company that translated and published a whole lot of boardgames, including D&D. Fully illustrated with amazing art by Paolo Parente, it came out in a swanky boxed set, and I remember it had a really deep and rich and colourful celtic-inspired setting (with elves and dwarves of the Tolkien kind IIRC) that made me really want to play it, and the bard class was pretty awesome and not only setting relevant but with interesting mechanics for different instrument and the possibly to have different bards singing and playing together. The last parts of the game i remember were hit location and that bagpipes were awesome for bards but they would not allow to sing at the same time. I gave it away to a classmate that dropped out at the end of the year and I never saw again.

BTW, Cyb is one of the 16-pages-affairs from Giochi del Duemila, but was published first as a double centrefold in a gaming magazine called Kappa in I believe 1990 or 1991. The same series published Kalevala by the always awesome Luigi Castellani, which now is doing illustrations aplenty for RPGs. You better ask him about that.

Paolo Greco

Sorry, Cyb seems more like the first Fallout, of all the things.

Paolo Greco

OK. How many words is it until now? There's still a couple of bits about Signori del Caos, magazines, translations and import.

Paolo Greco

Also, I now feel compelled to write more about Kata Kumbas.

Paolo Greco

Btw, if you have specific questions, fire away. You might poke at memories.

I just remembered that finding people in my town to play with was incredibly difficult.

Patrick Stuart

Is there anything else you remember about the bards in Druid (becasue clearly Bards are an amazing class and should be played more)?

Paolo Greco

23 May 2014

They had a list of songs but I can't remember how it was obtained. There's a chance it might have been the only magic players could use.

Not having sources at hand is grim

Patrick Stuart

Did you want to talk about Signori del Caos, magazines, translations and import?

Paolo Greco

So. SDC eluded me, I saved to buy a copy but when I had the money the Ars Magica translation came up and I went all "ohhh Ars Magica must have"

And then someone else got SDC. And I got sad. Later research puts it straight in the "improved DND" field, and nowadays I'm curious to see what essentially a 80s clone of ADND looks like. Also, SDC is the first Italian published RPG: apparently when its publisher heard about Kata Kumbas being released soon they rushed the job and botched it somewhat. For some reason I imagine it as some kind of spaghetti-arduin.

Paolo Greco

Sadly the usual suspects that source my odd RPGs came up empty handed for this.

Patrick Stuart

What about magazine, did you have an italian Dragon or White Dwarf?

Patrick Stuart

(p_-)

Paolo Greco

Sorry.

Yes, we had one. We had two actually.

Granata Press mostly translated manga to Italian, but also printed a magazine called Kaos, which published material and articles about all kind of RPGs and was famous for its extremely irregular schedule. When Granata went under, Nexus took it (I'm not sure if Nexus started with Kaos or not) and did not improve its schedule but kept on churning out good content, and had some stand-alone games in it, like the First of the North Star Simulacri adaptation, and was pretty cool. Later on Nexus put out two more magazines: Oracolo (on TCGs) and another Kaos spinoff with only materials for games published or translated by Nexus.

Stratelibri had a house organ called Excalibur, and as far as I know supported only the games translated by the publisher - Cyberpunk 2020, CoC, Stormbringer and possibly a few others I forgot. I was not interested in their games and, most importantly, for some reason it slagged off Kaos going to press with things like "they better stay in their graves". So Nexus brought them to court, and Stratelibri had to make amends. They both died in the late nineties IIRC.

Then there was Rune, which was basically a posh A4 zine, which sometimes ended up being distributed at the newsagent, and was mostly adventures and supplements for fantasy RPGs, mostly D&D.

Judging by Rune, I can't estimate how many rpg zines were published in Italy. I know of Spellbook being published somewhere in Tuscany, and IIRC its crew became Nexus.

Patrick Stuart

Ok first Kaos? That is the coolest fucking name for a magazine ever. And they were hated by Excalibur? The Italian mag scene sounds cool as shit.

Also "First of the North Star Simulacri adaptation" WTF? That sounds amazing.

Those weren't really questions

Paolo Greco

Simulacri is a French RPG translated by nexus. It's generic but much lighter than gurps. And Granata was publishing the translation of Fist of the North Star, in a comic monthly magazine called Zero, together with Baoh and XENON. Yeah, much violence, so amazing, wow. At any rate, they put out a small supplement for simulacri. Was very badass.

Paolo Greco

As they were also publishing the translation of Bastard!! eventually they released also the simulacri supplement for Bastard!! in the back of the comic. So we played a couple of sessions of simulacri with Fist of the North Star melee and Bastard!! Magic. I don't think I ever ran anything as awesome.

Paolo Greco

That's what generic systems are for. Merging the awesome

Patrick Stuart

Well, that's all the questions I got. I will ask one final one; if you could magically translate one italian rpg into english and distribute it, which one would you choose?

The
gang have continued with what must be one of the longest running projects in
the RPG blogosphere, a full conversion of Traveller to represent almost every
story in Cordwainer Smith’s ‘Instrumentality of Man’ sequence. The team has finally
reached ‘Scanners Live in Vain’ and both the background and the ruleset for the
Scanners, along with the free adventure are all fascinating to read.

Calf
Ambles, the South American cave explorer and expert in Mayan religion has his
latest post up about Mayan Underworld and how it relates to the cave systems of
Mexico and South America. He updates rarely between expeditions and they can be
a long read but I recommend you put and hour aside to take a look. No-one knows
the underworld like Ambles.

Mark
"Mark" Jenkins’s twenty year study of west African ‘drum language’
has finally resulted in a breakdown of this aural/kinetic/psychological rhythm
speech into easily comprehensible lessons. Not only that, but as a long time
D&D fan he has created a game-useable drum language module! DM’s can now
finally incorporate drum-language into their games in a way that is both intuitive
and appropriate. You can download it for free from his site.

Kristos
Tuxedos is continuing his construction of a new racially-inverse Game of Thrones
series, set during the events of the first series , but on the other side of
the world on a continent the size of Westros but with the racial mix exactly
that of current real-life America, each racial group assumed to have been in
its current position for thousands of years and each having a complex invented
history. The prospective casting-and-workshop mechanism is being worked out
ahead of time as several racial communities do not currently have a deep well
of actors from which to draw. Each grouping is being given given to a different
fantasy author to work out the background.

I know
Tuxedos has received a lot of flack from RPG.net for ‘appropriation’ and those
criticisms may have some validity, but I for one am very excited about what he’s
doing here.

In
this post we find out that the so far un-named continent is being threatened by
elemental forces emanating from ancient impact site volcanic calerdra, finally
making sense of the prospective title, 'Empire of Fire'.

Moses
Brown is continuing his giga-list of people capable of doing layout work on books.
It now includes recent design graduates, the old guys who used to design
dictionaries and bibles but who are now retired and a bunch of freelancers

Missy
Peyote runs he sharpest RPG news blog in the internet and he does it for free.
In this post she conforms that TSR have released the Harrison Hack of the 5th
ed starter pack. Each release of the pack will contain a full playable game.
The choice of which rules to include, their arrangement and advice, will depend
on the Guest Editor for that Volume. Some have claimed J.M.Harrison’s game is both
depressing and unplayable, well, soon we will find out for real.

Actual
Play diaries from a prison librarian. Looks like the sharpened pencil is still
missing and no-one owning up so the warden is keeping everyone in the study hall
till someone breaks. Meanwhile, in the game, Tyron’s magic user ‘AK Forty’ is
approaching the shores of

Kalbosh
where he hopes to discover the truth about the Conspiracy of Smiles. Will the
long-bubbling resentment between AK Forty and Markus's Cleric ‘HammerHood’
finally come to the surface and will it change the group dynamic? Theodore has
promised to keep updating the blog till the random search guys realise his
daily chocolate bar is a European iPhone.

I think
it’s done. I can’t think of much else to put in it. It needs a thing for
large-scare area’s. The cave gen system needs hacking so you can produce
different types of area. Drow and Duergar need some items or stuff. Some
smaller races haven’t even been considered. Need hypothermia rules too.

HUMAN
AGENT YOUR MISSION IS INCOMPLETE!

It’s 82,000
word though and I’m tired. Its big enough! It’s too big! The risk for a
publisher is too great so it will never get made.

WHY
DID YOU CREATE THIS THING HUMAN AGENT?

… I
can’t even remember. Because I promised to? Because I started thinking about
underground spaces and couldn’t stop?

I
think I wanted to make the world a more interesting place so I tried to make a
thing that would force the people who read it to become more interesting.
Something that wouldn’t dissolve in their minds so they would have to carry a
little piece of me around with them from that point on, like a brain egg.

THE
DERO APPROVE OF THIS MISSION HUMAN AGENT. BY WHAT MEANS IS YOUR MIND CONTROL
ENGAGED?

The
first part is all about living organisms. Living things presence themselves in
the mind more fully so if someone has a head full of these they won’t be able
to shake them loose.

Also
the bestiary is written in extremely dense and rhythmic prose designed to enter
the mind in a smooth overwhelming flow, like a salmon diving into a pool or a
syringe entering the skin. Then the animal is inside you and instead of looking
at the book to run it you just run with whatever version implanted itself in
your mind.

PEOPLE
WILL BE ANGRY BECAUSE THAT MAKES IT HARDER TO LOOK THINGS UP.

Yeah.

HALF
OF THE BOOK IS NOT MONSTERS. WHY?

That’s
the Vornheim side. That’s all about playing underground for extended periods of
time. Generating caves and complexes, climbing, starving, light and dark.

WHY IS
STARVING TO DEATH AN EXCITING GAME ARTIFACT.

I am
confident that my rules for starving to death are some of the most exciting starvation-based
rules ever devised!

WHAT
HUMANS WILL SHARE THIS OPINION

Not
many. But! The whole thing is designed in a modular way so that the rulesets
work well together but you can also strip them out and use them in pieces if
you want to. It’s like the opposite of Torchbearer.

NERDS
WILL NOT RESPECT A NON-TIGHT RULESET HUMAN BECAUSE THEY ALL HAVE ASPERGERS

I’m
going to call it a Modual AK47 ruleset because like the AK47 its made of chunky
resistant parts that can be easily replaced and that when in use, shake free
the detritus and crap of the environment so its kind of self-cleaning and
really the ak47was a bad metaphor.

DO YOU
HAVE A ‘DESIGN PHILOSPHY’ HUMAN. RPG NERDS LIKE A DESIGN PHILOSOPHY. SOME LIKE
IT MORE THAN THE ACTUAL GAME.

I didn’t
have one when I started but I suppose making a bunch of stuff reveals the philosophy
encoded in the design.

I hate
adding more than three numbers together.

I hate
including negative numbers.

I hate
DC’s or things where the world gets more or less difficult. I like flat
positive numbers you can get in one roll. It looks like I have tried to move
almost all the complexity off the roll itself and onto a bunch of tables that
only come up when you need them

I hate
things where in infinite amount of variation in the world it taken into account
by adding or removing plusses or minuses from a roll.

Calculating.
I hate calculating. I would rather just roll two dice.

I like
living things. I made darkness a living thing. The cavern complexes almost have
personalities. I turned madness itself into a monster that follows you
endlessly.

Apparently
I like art because there’s a fair amount of that in there.

I seem
to like things and people going insane. There are about a million ways to go
crazy in this thing.

Apparently
I’m into slavery too casue there’s a fair amount of that in there.

THE
DERO APPROVE OF THIS

Yes.

YET
YOU HAVE NOT DONE SLAVERY RULES OR THE WEIRD TRIGGERY MISANDRY RULES YOU WERE
THINKING OF FOR DROW

Too depressing
My life’s hard enough already without thinking about that shit. You will just
have to go on with the madness and starvation.

OH WE
WILL HUMAN. YOU ALSO LIKE THE FUNNY DICE DO YOU NOT

Yeah,
the d100 plays a big role. I started using it because it has more numbers so
you can convert skill levels from other D&Ds to a scale of 100 without
losing any granularity. The d6 LOTFP skills are still there if you want them. The
4’s 6’s and 8’s play a role in cave gen. The d12 is a bit left out, but then it
always is.

HOW
CAN AN UNDERDARK BE GENERATED HUMAN? IT IS NEITHER A CITY LIKE VORNHIEM IN
WHICH EVERYTHING IS ACCESSABLE AND CLOSE, OR A WILDERNESS IN WHICH ALL IS
DISTANT, SEPERATED BY MOUNTAINS AND TREEEEEEESSSSSSSS

It can’t
really. I came up with some insane cryptic collection of systems that looks
mental even to me. Maybe it works?

YOU HAVE
FAILED HUMAN AS THE DERO KNEW YOU WOULD

Yep.

HOW
HAVE YOU FAILED THE TEST OF INFORMATION DESIGN HUMAN

By
just banging all the tables in wherever and bookmarking the pdf.

HOW
HAVE YOU FAILED THE TEST OF MARKETING HUMAN

Well
about 200 people read this blog, so if we assume 5% buy it, then 10 people
will. Except a lot of them have already taken a look at it so they don’t really
need to.

Oh I
forgot

WHAT
MEMORIES HAVE BEEN REMOVED FROM YOU HUMAN

The
original thing that prompted me was that Noisms told me to do it in a comment